THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 25, 1994 TAG: 9407250145
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: TALLADEGA, ALA. LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
The highly tuned restrictor-plate engines used at Talladega Superspeedway run on the ragged edge of destruction, and sometimes even the most reliable ones break.
In Sunday's DieHard 500, two of the Winston Cup series' best drivers - Rusty Wallace and Dale Earnhardt - went home early after their engines burned up.
The result was a shuffling in the series points standings that put Ernie Irvan, Sunday's third-place finisher, back on top.
Irvan now has a 16-point lead over Earnhardt. Mark Martin moved up to third, 258 points behind Irvan. Wallace fell to fourth, 34 behind Martin.
Wallace's departure came shockingly quickly. He was off the pace after only seven laps. Wallace completed only one more circuit and finished 42nd - dead last.
As his Ford smoked around the track, Wallace told his crew: ``It blowed up. No fixing it. The car was handling. Everything was all right. Lost a motor. Sorry, guys, the party's over.''
Moments later, standing beside his car in the garage, Wallace said: ``I really haven't had much luck at all at Talladega, but at least I had a car that could handle this time. We just lost a cylinder. The thing that upsets me is that this really affects our hunt for the championship.''
Earnhardt's engine went sour shortly after his first green-flag pit stop on lap 73, although he motored around several more times with a powerplant that sounded as if it had been built in 1910. He lasted a total of 80 laps and finished 32nd.
``We burned a piston,'' he said. ``Then we went back out and tried to run some more and burned another piston. We were trying to get the best out of it that we could.''
Earnhardt pinpointed the reason for the engine failure: ``Coming out of the pits by myself, I didn't have any drafting partners. I didn't have any wind in the car and it was laboring along about 6,000 rpm. That's when it burned a piston.''
As for the points race, Earnhardt said, ``It's not over with by a long shot. It's a long time before it's over with.''
Geoff Bodine also blew an engine, dropping out after 136 laps to finish 33rd.
``It blew up,'' Bodine said. ``We don't know if we burnt a piston like a lot of guys today or if we had a parts failure inside. You don't know until you take it apart.''
Other drivers who parked their cars after their engines failed were Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett, Michael Waltrip, Jeff Purvis, Joe Nemechek and Loy Allen Jr.
Car owner Jack Roush, an articulate expert on engines, explained the reason for the rash of failures:
``The restrictor-plate engines are real sensitive to partial throttle. Cars were loose today and sometimes they couldn't run wide open, so the drivers had to breathe the throttle. And that's when the burned pistons started showing up.''
Larry McReynolds, Irvan's crew chief, agreed with Roush's assessment and added that many of the burned pistons occurred when drivers were entering or leaving the pits and getting off or on the accelerator.
ALDRIN'S VISIT: Never did the Winston Cup drivers listen more attentively to a speaker in the driver's meeting than when the race's grand marshal, Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin ``Buzz'' Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, spoke Sunday morning.
After receiving a standing ovation, Aldrin held everyone's attention with a short but inspiring speech.
``I feel honored to be in the presence of the legends of driving,'' Aldrin said. He broke everyone up when he said, ``We were flying at seven miles per second coming back into the atmosphere. But we weren't very close to anything.''
IN THE LINE OF DUTY: Earnhardt's car carried a small decal bearing the number 12 in memory of a fan.
Lt. Mike Lutz, a member of the Muskingum (Ohio) County Sheriff's Department who was killed in the line of duty recently, was a diehard Earnhardt fan. The officer's will requested that a black Earnhardt flag fly above his grave on the day of his burial. Earnhardt's team returned the salute by carrying the decal.
MONTE CARLO TEST: Dale Jarrett will remain in Talladega today to test the new Monte Carlo, which will replace the Lumina as Chevy's Winston Cup car in 1995. ILLUSTRATION: THE RICKY RUDD REPORT
[For a copy of the report, see microfilm for this date.]
by CNB